xi. If instability in India gradually came to an end, after a decade and a half, the hoteliers might get business again.
If the hoteliers got business again, especially those that converted their erstwhile royal palaces into hotels, it implied the same could be done with some of the royal palaces in Europe. These would have European ownership, the benefits of a particular kind of economy since 2013 could dissipate.
The urgency couldn't be worse.
Antara might find herself kicked up to 'where she belonged', while continuing to live in Delhi, as mid-grade bankers ran through Europe to find out who had a problem with Islamabad's rising profile.
Who had a problem!
With the above in mind, if a former POTUS had set himself the task of gathering information, on behalf of militaries, about how Antara's life unfolded in the mid-1990s, as she went to Kolkata for college, she'd find it hard to protest.
No one at home had any idea of staying at a hostel because they had never done so.
Ajit had gone to Kolkata with a govt job/engineer, around 1960-61, he was in his early 20s, he stayed at a boarding for working men, it was located at Entally in central Kolkata (the "Entally Mess").
"For the first time in my life, I was free to eat eggs, I ate six or seven eggs a day, sometimes eight or nine, whenever I could, boiled, poached, omelettes, I lived on eggs," Ajit would say later in life.
That's how he survived, Anjali would explain.
Ajit's office was located at the New Secretariat Building, next to the Hooghly River, Kolkata's first swanky high-rise, several changes of tramways from central Kolkata to reach his office, "I hardly walked, often I ran, to be young and so free."
Antara, on the other hand, was going away from the relative freedom of home (where one could do as one pleased), the stolidity of Anjali (Ajit had grown up without a mother), agreeing to take the family suitcase to Brabourne hostel but not agreeing to the trunk (Antara found it cumbrous, unwieldy).
Was that what the former POTUS wanted to know, Dems were one thing, why Antara wanted to stay away from the GOP as well?
It was clear the Cold War's end had not left a better world, that she'd be defined in a certain way, she won't "run free" like Ajit and his Entally Mess friends, at every step she and her generation would have to defend Asansol AG Church till one day they found out about Tobe Hooper and Texas Chainsaw.
What did I do? Whose discipline did I enact, what did I represent?
Antara should have been careful when they sang the school anthem,
"...Onward moves our banner/Onwards do we go/Marching in with honour/Singing Victory song..."
There you go, Victory bonds (WWI) and TV Soong, Antara had been singing at school about her own irrelevance.
Another way of looking at it was from Brabourne.
Those like Antara, Noida, Jayanti-di (all Asansol AG) or even Sujata S, Sandy, Jyotsna (Loreto Asansol) had provided their own Victory bonds/debt securities to those in Kolkata, lending the presence of those hallowed institutions to Kolkata city, for assistance in their time of need.
Over the last two years, Antara didn't see any sign of that assistance, apparently Antara was an unknown entity ('eta abar ke re'/who was this woman), she had fantastic ideas of herself, she was looking for immigration touts or shortcuts.
There was no question of Kolkata repaying that earlier debt to Brabourne.
On the first day of her joining Junior College Brabourne in the mid-1990s, while waiting outside the Hotel Superintendent's office for her turn to complete the paperwork, Antara had overheard Shanti-di, the Superintendent (called 'Grendel' by generations of Brabourne Hostel students, a fierce Old English creature) discussing with the hostel matrons,
"Hans (duck) as well as dak (duck)? Duckduck? How was that possible?"
Karl Hass, German SS war criminal, might have been a monarchist.
Captain Lightoller (RMS Titanic), an anti-monarchist, stayed at 1, Duckworth Place in London, also called 1 Duck's Walk.
Who had set up such a play within Brabourne Hostel?
--
The following would come up for global discussions, after the Iran deal, for any emerging consensus about NASA, whether the Indian obsession with working for NASA was about space or astronomy or something else altogether.
i. Was there a total solar eclipse in Oct 1995?
ii. If we were to "stay with the here and now" or "better be inside", the threats made to Antara over the last few hours, if Antara was somehow "polluting the environment" similar to what was felt in Europe of the 1930s, then was the Oct 1995 solar eclipse actually a solar eclipse? Or was it the "fall of Ajit"?
What did NASA have to say?
iii. Anjali had shown no inclination to travel to Ajodhya Hills in Purulia, the closest location from where the totality of the solar eclipse would be visible. Did she not understand how eclipses occurred?
Or was she afraid of the Lutheran Church, which had once employed a close relative of hers at Ajodhya Hills in Purulia (around seven years) for the Israel-Gaza unified entity of the future?
iv. Anjali didn't use the mechanism Antara had made at home for watching the partial solar eclipse (as it was in Asansol) either.
If NASA was the fallback option if the Gaza Board of Peace failed, why did it keep up its 'outer space' front? At least the Indian obsession with NASA would be understood in terms of the Jewish homeland.
If Anjali had no scientific interests, how did her descendants become such scientific stalwarts?
v. Among those who went to Ajodhya Hills in Purulia, railways peon Anshu had said, "Strange was the totality, whole body went cold"/ "body-ta thanda hoye gelo". Anjali often referred to it in the subsequent years, so she was aware that NASA could turn the United States into a pro-Central Provinces and Berar country, as it seemed to have done in the mid-1990s.
Thus, Anjali took care of her elder daughter, marrying her into a Berar family, she took care of her 'younger' daughter who settled in San Diego, California and the supposedly adopted daughter Antara?
Antara would pick a battle with Berar, NASA Bhopali would attack the US Air Force and just about any Bhopali, with or without Surma, could tear her to pieces?
vi. Somewhere around those days of the Oct 1995 solar eclipse, Noida came for a visit to the Housing flat. She had missed some Eng Lit classes at Junior College Brabourne, it was the Diwali vacation, she wanted to copy what was taught at class from Antara.
Was Anjali correct in assuming that Noida was elated at Ajit's fall and had come to celebrate?
Or was Antara wrong in assuming that when it came to the British, Noida would have followed Antara but Berar's grip on NASA became the problem?
vii. Because of deliberate misrepresentation and propaganda by Anjali's side, Antara was becoming the target of vicious wives. They could shout abuses at her doorstep for years and decades, she couldn't even confront a few workers who had dug deep trenches around her.
The time has come for an elaborate and public discussion of Anjali's life.
June 20-21, 2026.
****
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